


Years from now

by orphan_account



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Gen, Kinda, Melancholy, Sister Complex, impressionism with words, just a little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-26
Updated: 2004-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 21:22:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/495784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even now, I see it. The hospital walls, the children playing, and my mother’s eyes—soft and confident—filled with the notion of her unborn little girl. It’s all still clear, though all the frames on all the walls are lined with these brown-eyes babies that my sister created for her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Years from now

I can still remember the day she was born. It rained the night before, and the roads were like sheets of glass on top of the asphalt. The tires of the car cut through it like knives, the splashes from the puddles sometimes rose all the way up to my window. Everything outside was green blurs, speeding white lines of fences, or the visual chunks of houses. I’d never seen my father drive so fast.

  
I spent most of the morning in a chair by a window in a room that I remember had a discouragingly dingy carpet. A couple of kids were sitting on it, playing with little cars or trucks; something like that. Nurses kept asking me if I wanted some paper to draw on or some of the candy in the bowl on someone’s desk. Each time I shook my head, not once looking away from the outside spring. The sun was rising through tree branches, and the tops of all the cherry blossoms were white with it.   
My mother had only left me there an hour ago, smiling, kneeling to my eye level and kissing my cheek. I was worried for her. I caught the way she was subtly clinging to my father’s side just for the ability to walk. Even before we’d gotten into the car, I could tell that she was in a pain I was too young or too confused to understand. She’d been sitting on the couch with her forehead in her hands, breathing heavier than I was used to seeing.   
It’s okay, she said when she caught me staring at her, and gathered me to her side. I shared her embrace with the swollen anticipation of her stomach. I could sense her pain, and I still wonder if she ever knew that. But she’d smiled so easily at me. Something very good is happening, she said. I could feel my eyes narrowing skeptically at her. I thought that she was lying.   
But I didn’t know much of anything that year, which I soon learned. I didn’t have an opinion about little sisters as it stood, let alone what it would be like to have one. I had a picture in my mind of a child like the girls in my first grade class. Wearing pigtails and daring each other to kiss whichever boy spoke to them first. It... was a frightening thought, actually.   
School was another matter I was considering. We were supposed to start painting that day, and I really wanted to make something for my mother. I had only just turned seven, and as such knew that I was talentless as anyone; But that wasn’t on my mind. I knew that whatever it was I presented my mother with, she would smile her reserved smile for me. And she’d love anything that came from my mind or heart or hands. That was _our_ smile; From her and just for me. I found myself hoping that my sister would understand that.   
I saw her less than an hour after we came to the hospital, a few minutes after she was born I suppose. There was a big glass window overlooking a small white room filled with plastic cribs, little creatures in pink or blue blobs of cotton. I knew who she was before my father pointed her out, before I could have read the last name on the yellow label. I’m still not sure if it was some strange magic that guided my eyes to her or just genuine intuition. But still she was there, suddenly existing where only moments ago she had been no more than a concept. Just sleeping, her cheek squished against a cottony pink shoulder.   
I forgot all about paints suddenly.   
It might sound biased, but I’d seen a fair share of babies by the time I’d turned seven. It was a collection from television and being at friends’ houses. They all looked the same. Some with more or less hair, some with more or less absurd outfits.   
But Sakura really was different. I could have picked her out from a million other infants, all with the same clothes even. There was something about her eyes that I always liked, round and sincerely soft. Sometimes I just sat next to my mother while she was taking care of her, watching her face, concluding every time that she was easily the most different creature I’d ever seen. I wouldn’t have given her up even for something quieter, something that didn’t wake us all up at night like some sort of insomniac monster, something my mother didn’t smile so often at. I’d be lying to say that the way my mother smiled at her didn’t make me jealous. I’d even be lying if I said I didn’t ever consider hiding her behind the couch sometimes.   
I’m not sure if first holding her really had anything to do with my jealousy towards her, but that’s when it went away. She was a week old. My parents asked me sometimes if I wanted to try holding her, and each time I shook my head and took a step away. It seemed like such a careful procedure, supporting this, holding that, not letting anything dangle, walking slowly.   
"Here." My mother suddenly decided to say one afternoon while I was sitting on the couch. She put the throw pillows on either side of me. And, grinning like a child herself, handed me my sister. She was careful, though, like dust settling to a surface. She stayed knelt in front of me until... I don’t know when. I guess until she felt confident enough to stand and back out of direct view. I can’t remember seeing her move, only that she said, "Hold your little sister, Toya."   
It was confusing as hell, though, to be so aware of something that was still too small to even talk to me. I can’t remember most of the thoughts in my head, only that there must have been millions. But, for each of them, she just laid there on my lap, inattentively flailing a hand or a leg, staring at me with a trust I didn’t know I’d earned. As though she believed I’d never really stuff her behind the couch and say that God took her back, as though I or nothing else would ever hurt her at all. I was the one between us that knew the truth: there were evil things in the world, things that could hurt her, things that would probably bring her to tears someday. Not even evil, entirely; Just... things.   
I guess that’s when I began trying so hard to protect her.   
It was the middle of the night when our mother died. I guess it was a short illness because even I hadn’t really seen it coming. I’d have dreams of her touching my forehead, telling me she loved me, that she loved Sakura too. They started suddenly, from nowhere. And then one night she smiled her reserved smile at me. I was overcome with an incredible comfort and warmth. I didn’t know that I was dreaming; I was so sure that I was in her arms, and then she disappeared before I could have reached for her hand. I woke up with my fingers stretched into the air.   
It was dark in my room because I was ten, and I’d decided the summer before that I didn’t need a nightlight anymore. The next thing I heard was Sakura’s abrupt scream. There was complete silence after that. All the weight in me had gone to my stomach; My head was empty.   
I didn’t hear either of my parents’ footsteps walking the hall to get to her room. So I went.   
Her bed was empty, and the pink nightlight by her door had gone out—we tried later to change the bulb, but it never worked again—she later started sleeping with her window-blinds raised because she said the stars wouldn’t burn out. I found her curled up on the floor in the closet, hugging herself to her chest. No matter what I said or did, she wouldn’t stop crying, not even after I started holding her hand.   
It was more than intuition that told me our mother was gone; Sakura didn’t say anything at all that night, but I know she felt it too—sometimes I wonder just how severely.   
I tucked her back into her bed, thoughtful. She was three years old, and as such, did sometimes cry over menial things. Cry over something spilt, cry over a bad dream, falling down, having to go to bed. And, because of the very same principal that she was three, she was asleep before I’d finished reading to her.   
I was holding her hand a week later as we stood over the open grave. We watched the casket sift to the earth. Like slow motion, a yellow flower followed it down from her little open hand. She’d been holding the thing all day, and it was crumpled and sweaty from her palm. "Is it my fault?" She whispered to me.   
Looking back, that would have been a good opportunity to be more of a brother to her. I knew that the answer to her question was no, and I wondered for the rest of the gray afternoon why she’d chosen to ask me. Maybe there was some sort of trust for me in her, even though I teased her, even though she told me I was mean. Sometimes children knew who loved them, even with no evidence of such.   
She looked so small right then in her lacey dress, a sloppy homemade crown of flowers around the halo of her short hair. I could have picked her up, she would have let me. I could have carried her to the spreading tree by the fence at the edge of the graveyard, sat her down and explained the randomness of death. I was seven years wiser of the world; I could have at least comforted her.   
But she waited quietly for her answer, and I just shook my head. The dirt rattled over the smooth surface of the coffin, and I’ve never heard her talk of it again. She was quieter in those hours than I’d ever seen, starry-eyed, swinging her feet when she sat. Not eating, not slurping the last two drops of her drink with the ever-irritating rattle of her straw. Just silent, trapped in the thoughts nobody expected of a three-year-old mind. She didn’t cry at all that entire day.   
I worried about the way she _did_ cry sometimes. It would just start suddenly, even in broad daylight; Not often, but enough still to make me think. She hid sometimes under chairs or blankets days after I’d said something clever to scare her.   
I never told her that the things I used to describe were real. We’d be sitting in the middle of the   
living room floor sometimes, watching TV or something boring as that, and I’d see what I believe were ghosts. Little girls without legs, old men bleeding. They never hurt anything, and it never truly bothered me because I’d grown up with these images as my personal secret. And when I talked to them, just to scare my sister, they didn’t hear me.   
And I, being her brother and a kid myself, used to tease her with stories I told with fictional prose. Horrible things, mean things. She’d cover her ears and whine, and I’d grin about it. But when I saw that it genuinely upset her, I stopped.   
She still cried.   
I saw our mother sometimes. She didn’t say much, if anything most of the time. She didn’t stay for long, either. But she smiled right at me, and I’m sure she knew that I could see her.   
I remember watching Sakura one afternoon, coloring at the kitchen table, hair in pigtails, swinging her legs over the seat. I was making lunch for her, and when I turned around, Mother was standing over her. She touched the top of her hair, and I was so sure that she would feel it. But she didn’t. She saw me staring and looked up to follow my gaze. Her eyes were just two-second question marks, and she went back to her drawing.   
I never understood that. I still don’t.   
I could feel her magic, growing like skin on her as she grew with it, unaware for years of her own capabilities. It kept me to her, though. I knew when she was safe, and for so long I believed as easily as the blue of the sky that I’d always be able to protect her. And she, scowling at my comments from across the breakfast table, had no idea just how shattered I would have been if anything ever happened to her.   
And whenever something did happen, I was there. Little things, mostly. I carried her home from school in the rain while she slept on my shoulder, burning with the flu. I snickered at her in the mornings that she struggled to have her roller-blades on in time to keep up with my bike; But I wouldn’t have left so quickly if I thought she wouldn’t follow me.   
It went on this way for all of her life and for most of mine. For years, I took care of her without once letting her know.   
That was before something bigger than fevers and roller-blades happened.   
He came on a morning flight from Hong Kong. I met him years ago, by the linked fence outside of Sakura’s elementary school. I didn’t have a good look at his face until I’d raised him to my eyes by the collar, and, God, I wanted to kill the kid for thinking he could grab my little sister’s arm the way he had.   
But then I saw his eyes. He jerked away and I glared at the four-foot-offender, muttering my warning.   
It didn’t bother me that he seemed so much to hate my sister (I’d even wish for that again.) To be honest, in the years that passed I’ve almost forgotten the sharp rage I had when I saw Sakura wriggling helplessly from his cornered grasp. He was a kid; kids can be idiots.   
What bothered me was something that could not be countered by a firm chokehold. Something that I suppose even burying him alive wouldn’t solve... though sometimes I’ve entertained the thought of trying.   
I’m not sure how I knew. He didn’t know; Sakura didn’t know—at least, not until the afternoon she came home from school, no more than a blur of color, her footsteps choking over the stairs. I heard her close the bedroom door, and something in me burned on a short rope and died in thin smoke.   
I still don’t know what he said to her that afternoon. Were they standing over the same spot they’d first spoken, and fought, two years earlier? Or in the park, sitting motionlessly on the swings. He’d always seemed so stupidly shy to me; I couldn’t, nor did I _want,_ to picture him looking her evenly in the eyes without turning red as a sunset and telling her, with confidence and maturity, "I love you."   
What I could picture, though, was how Sakura must have looked. Standing frozen in the Autumn, wind in her hair and leaves swirling like magic around her ankles. Fists at her sides and a thoughtlessly gaping jaw. Although she would be far from thoughtless.   
And then he was gone, leaving her ears with the ghosts of the most confusing words in the actual history of words themselves. They must have echoed and burned in her like flames until they were unbearable, until she turned and ran, shoes slamming the pavement like her heart pounding in her chest. Threw herself past the front door and tripped up to her bedroom, craving nothing other than to spend the rest of the day under her blankets.   
I couldn’t reach her there. I had an absent thought of bringing her a warm mug of milk and honey. I figured it was what our mother would have done—well, to coincide with a long talk that I was far from prepared to give her, and thus never would. I knocked on her door, but she just pretended to be asleep. Or maybe she actually _was_ asleep, but I doubt it.   
It’s impossible even now to think of the things in her head that day. She’d always been my clumsy little sister. Always late. Always irritated and flustered by my comments. Always as she should be.   
Again, I don’t know how her answer to his... words... went. He left on another morning plane to China, and I thought—maybe—he’d never come back. Maybe, in five or twenty years, she’d find someone else. Someone that I could worry about later, when the time came.   
But he was back suddenly one afternoon. Attached to Sakura’s hand. I glared from the kitchen window at the way they stopped walking in the street. Thirteen years old. She leaned forward like a painting, and one of her sneakers left the ground. They kissed for all of a second and a half. I heard the crash before I realized that the dish left my hand.   
I’ve watched her grow from the day she was born. I still look at her sometimes, at the round chin that grew on a graceful neck, at the eyes I’ve admired since she was an infant our mother so deftly held, and I can only see a little girl. I see a toddler priding herself on walking without anyone’s help, a stubborn child standing on tiptoes attempting to reach the sink without standing on a soapbox. I still see a three-year-old girl picking a yellow flower from a garden that would soon die in grievance of its true tender, so that she could drop it for her mother to find on a cloud just above human understanding.   
But then I blink, and suddenly she’s this beautiful thing with her mother’s eyes. Nineteen years old; Taller than the sink now but still lower than my shoulder. When she smiles at me, it’s like a magic wand of color thrust over a million and one old photographs that would just fade without her.   
"Oniichan?"   
She touched my hand one evening as I was standing from the dinner table. She’d come to my apartment that night because she said she was worried that I wasn’t eating well. We both knew, however, that I was the one who’d helped teach her to cook. This, in its own, worried me.   
Her eyes were so green when she looked at me with them. I sat back down.   
There was something she needed to ask me, she said. Looked at her lap, cleared her throat. I don’t think I replied, because suddenly she was talking and I was silenced by her words.   
"He asked me to marry him." She said, and raised her eyes slowly to me, keeping her head tilted downwards. She looked so confident with her words, so firm. And yet, at the same time, smaller and more timid than I’d ever seen. "I said yes."   
There were no words for this. Silence throbbed between us like blood, like fountains, like years tumbling over long and endless hills. For the first time since my mother’s death, I wanted to cry. I hadn’t done so then, not even at the funeral. I’d made note to do it later and just never had. It was the shock that stopped me both times, I guess. The abrupt emptiness of losing something I’d devoted so much of my life to protecting. Years and years. My little sister. I helped her learn to walk. She wasn’t supposed to be getting married. She was supposed to be rollerblading. She was supposed to be ten years old.   
All of this buzzing in my head like bees. I could have cried right there on the empty plates. I slumped. "So?" I said.   
Her eyebrows came together. The mild childish frustration in her face almost got a smile out of me. Almost.   
"I want you to say that you don’t hate me." She was so serious that it was uncharacteristic.   
"I don’t hate you." I hate _him._   
"Oniichan." I felt her hand on mine again, soft as a warm blanket on a winter morning. She looked at me like a child, like my little sister, like Sakura.   
"It would really suck if you won’t be happy for me." Her hand tightened over mine. "I need you to be happy."   
It was the first time in my life that I’d ever heard her use the word ‘need.’ And I knew that, regardless to what I said—if I said anything at all—she was going to marry the kid. I also knew that she really did love him, and that he would definitely take extraordinary care of her. If he didn’t deserve her, nobody did. That was the thing that bothered me, though. Nobody deserved her.   
"Why?" I said. Smooth. Choking on memories inside.   
She leaned forward in her seat. Her eyes were wide and blunt. I could see her slamming her fist across the breakfast table. Her eyebrows drew together.   
She wasn’t making angry fists. She wasn’t a little girl.   
"Because." Her voice was so soft that it barely came above a thought. "You’re my brother."   
I smiled at her, which was rare in itself. All words had left me, and she understood that that was her answer. She hugged me and thanked me three or four times over. And she left my apartment that night, twirling under stars, her heart fluttering on hummingbird wings over and around her head.   
I watched her disappear into her car beneath the streetlight. She went to bed filled with wedding rings and white dresses and middle-of-the-street kisses. I sat on my couch, put my head in my hands, and could only think that I had nothing left in the world to fear. I’d just lost my little sister.   
I suppose that it happened gradually, and I knew it was approaching. I knew that she’d marry him. I knew he’d take her heart from the first time I saw his eyes, fierce and determined years ago behind the elementary school. I knew the two of them would grow out of their awkwardness. I knew, also, that she’d ask me to do something stupid and embarrassing like hold the rings. I said yes.   
It was hard to tell if it was a wedding or a funeral in my mind. She was prettier than I could have pictured her to be. For once, lovely. I wondered if she was still the clumsy girl I knew her to be underneath all of that white lace. I wondered if she was wearing roller-blades amidst the pearly train.   
I had my arms folded in the doorway while she stood in the mirror, twisting her lips at her reflection. Her best friend twirled around her like a bird, perfecting her hair, evening every last wrinkle while sprinkling compliments over her like glitter. I memorized her reflection, but when she turned to me I fought myself to remain standing.   
When had she grown up?   
Her face was nervous and awkward, which somehow comforted me. "Do I look stupid?" She said.   
And her best friend of what could have been a million years put a gentle arm around her shoulders, smiling her warm and patient smile at me. Even _she_ had grown, I thought, but her smile never changed. "Tell her that she looks beautiful," she coached. I begged my cheeks not to burn at the thought. But, God. Beautiful was just a dried leaf beneath her shoe.   
I squirmed at an itch in my collar. The tuxedo was too stiff.   
Pretty for a monster, I thought of saying. She was twisting the fluff of her dress in her hands, and her blue-eyed-maid-of-honor was idly swatting discouragement at the gesture.   
"You do," I said.   
She raised an eyebrow. Her nervousness throbbed all around her like the presence of a ghost. "Which?" She said, "beautiful or stupid?"   
"Both."   
She smiled at me. And I did not want to give her away.   
I guess I didn’t, not really. I let go of her hand in the church where I did not realize I was holding it. I watched her go, flowers dropping behind her feet and her white train swishing like ghost water.   
I watched him take her hand, I watched them mechanically recite—with watercolor eyes—words that put shame to their hearts. And then I watched him kiss her, and I closed my eyes, and I saw puddles in the street. Tires scraping through, leaves on a whirlwind and cold and early dawn.   
Even now, I see it. The hospital walls, the children playing, and my mother’s eyes—soft and confident—filled with the notion of her unborn little girl. It’s all still clear, though all the frames on all the walls are lined with these brown-eyes babies that my sister created for her own. And I’m watching her care for them, her slow smiles, her wispy graces—she will be the first thing that they remember, years from now. Years and years from now, when they’ve got thousands of memories to tangle her within, she will still be their mother. The one who whispered them to sleep, the one to never let them be lost in all the coldness that can be found in lack of love.   
And I’ll still see gray skies, years from now: window-motion-blurs and cherry blossoms shining beyond hospital walls. The day my little sister was born.


End file.
